The greater part of A Gun for Sale
takes place in Nottwich, which I later used again as
background for my play The PottingShed.
Nottwich, of course, is Nottingham where, as I have recounted A Sort of
Life, I lived for three winter months with a mongrel
terrier, working in the evenings as a trainee on the the
Nottingham Journal. I dont know why a certain wry
love of Nottingham lodged in my imagination rather as a
love of Freetown
was to do later. It was the furthest north I had ever
been, the first strange city in which I had made a home,
alone, without friends.

The main character in the novel,
Raven the killer, seems to me now a first sketch for
Pinkie in Brighton Rock. He is a Pinkie who has
aged but not grown up

If Raven is an older Pinkie, Mather I can
imagine to have been trained as police officer under the
Assistant Commissioner of Its a Battlefield;
a little of his superiors sober temperature has
rubbed off on him. He is not, like the Assistant
Commissioner, a born bachelor, but I think in time he
must have proved a little too square for Anne Crowder
with her indiscriminate passion for love.

What can I say of the other
characters? Doctor Yogel has something a certain police
doctor near Blackfriars to whom I once went in my youth,
terrified that I might be suffering from what used to be
called by an ironic euphemism a social disease; he told
me not to eat tomatoes, an instruction which I have
obeyed to this day. His dingy rooms on the top floor of a
tenement block and his abrupt furtive manner remained a
memory which I think contributed to the sketch of Doctor
Yogel.

There are certain scenes which I
like in this book. For example I am a little proud of the
air-raid practice in Nottwich which enabled Raven to
enter the offices of Sir Marcus. I wrote the scene in
1935 and the National Government had certainly not
reached that point of preparation, though such a practice
would have been plausible enough four years later. I like
too the character of Acky, the unfrocked clergyman, and
of his wifethe two old evil characters joined to
each other by a selfless love. I had not chosen an
Anglican clergyman for the part with any ill
intentI doubted at the time whether such purity of
love would seem plausible in a married and excommunicated
Catholic priest. I was to draw one later in The Power
and the Glory, Father Jose, but as a man I prefer
poor Acky. He was not the kind of sinner who has the
makings of a saint. His sense of guilt led only to
innumerable letters to his bishop, of self-justification
or accusation He belongs to the same world of wounds
and guilt as Raven and Pinkie.

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